About 1,000 high skilled migrants may be deported from the UK for security reasons, as the Home Office has refused “indefinite leave to remain” (IRL) according to a paragraph of the Immigration Act, targeting terrorist threats. The Home Office claims that the applicants have provided false information.
Their guidelines state that the ruling is generally applicable in cases on “criminality, a threat to national security, war crimes or travel bans.” However, the caseworkers still can deny the IRL if their “character and conduct” doesn’t seem to be desirable to allow applicants to live in the UK.
People acknowledged by the Home Office as threats are prohibited from obtaining a UK visa. Those deported on terror suspicions will also get a mark on their passport.
Cited by the Guardian newspaper, a Home Office spokesperson stressed that applications are denied “in these circumstances only where the evidence shows applicants have deliberately provided false information to the government” answering the recent claims by the UK’s immigration advocates and politicians. In the newspaper report they accused the Home Office of misusing the counter-terror legislation. According to their data, about 1,000 teachers, doctors, businessmen, lawyers, IT and engineering specialists wrongly face deportation because they made minor amendments to their tax return reports or had discrepancies in their income declarations.
The support group Highly Skilled Migrants, which provides help in courts for such specialists, stated to the newspaper that nine out of 10 of its members had won their cases against the government body. One of the group organizers, Aditi Bhardwaj, claims that this implies that the British authorities are either “recklessly incompetent” or “there is a blanket policy which the Home Office is using internally.”
The new revelation on alleged “targeted removals” has come hot on the heels of the so-called Windrush migration scandal and resignation of former Home Secretary Amber Rudd. The close ally to UK Prime Minister Theresa May walked out of the cabinet following an avalanche of criticism after a leaked internal Home Office memo. It revealed that the United Kingdom did use targets on migrant deportation, despite Rudd denying in front of Parliament that such targets exist.
READ MORE: Amber Rudd Resigns as UK Home Secretary Amid Migrant/Windrush Scandal
The UK Labour Party also urged her to step away for her treatment of people belonging to the so-called Windrush generation, who arrived in the United Kingdom from the Caribbean under free movement policies between the 1940s and 1970s. The scandal escalated in mid-April after it transpired that migrants from the Caribbean who settled in the UK decades ago were asked to prove their right to remain in Britain.
Over recent years, Europe has face a migration influx. Hundreds of thousands of migrants are still trying to reach European countries using various routes, including via Italy, Greece, Turkey and the Balkan states. According to an International Organization for Migration (IOM) report published in 2017, nearly 100,000 people had chosen a sea route to reach Europe in 2017.
